May 5, 1945: Japanese Balloon Bomb Kills 6 in Oregon

1945:: A Japanese balloon bomb kills six people in rural eastern Oregon. They are the only World War II U.S. combat casualties in the 48 states.

Months before an atomic bomb decimated Hiroshima, the United States and Japan were locked in the final stages of World War II. The United States had turned the tables and invaded Japan’s outlying islands three years after Japan’s invasion of the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor.

That probably seemed a world away to a Sunday school teacher, her minister husband and five 13- and 14-year-old students near Klamath Falls. Rev. Archie Mitchell was driving the group along a mountainous road on the way to a Saturday afternoon picnic, according to the Mail Tribune, a southern Oregon newspaper.

Teacher Elyse Mitchell, who was pregnant, became sick. Her husband pulled the sedan over. He began speaking to a construction crew about fishing conditions, and his wife and the students momentarily walked away.

They were about a hundred yards from the car when she shouted back: “Look what I found, dear,” the Mail Tribune reported.

One of the road-crew workers, Richard Barnhouse, said “There was a terrible explosion. Twigs flew through the air, pine needles began to fall, dead branches and dust, and dead logs went up.”

The minister and the road crew ran to the scene. Jay Gifford, Edward Engen, Sherman Shoemaker, Dick Patzke and their teacher were all dead, strewn around a one-foot hole. The teacher’s dress was ablaze. Dick Patzke’s sister Joan was severely injured and died minutes later, the Mail Tribune wrote.

The six were victims of Japan’s so-called Fu-Go or fire-balloon campaign. Carried aloft by 19,000 cubic feet of hydrogen and borne eastward by the jet stream, the balloons were designed to travel across the Pacific to North America, where they would drop incendiary devices or anti-personnel explosives.

Made of rubberized silk or paper, each balloon was about 33 feet in diameter. Barometer-operated valves released hydrogen if the balloon gained too much altitude or dropped sandbags if it flew too low.

In all, the Japanese released an estimated 9,000 fire balloons. At least 342 reached the United States. Some drifted as far as Nebraska. Some were shot down.